Back for another round of excitement we have Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and ROFLCon alumni. Ethan has been quite busy this last year, discussing topics from SOPA to cultural developments in Nigeria. Here is his ROFLCon inspired post from last year.

Moar soon!

]]> http://roflcon.org/2012/01/05/ethan-zuckerman-at-roflcon-iii/feed/ 0 http://roflcon.org/2010/04/20/biella-coleman-to-speak-at-roflcon/ http://roflcon.org/2010/04/20/biella-coleman-to-speak-at-roflcon/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:51:03 +0000 Tim Hwang http://roflcon.org/?p=1054

Good afternoon, ladies and chaps — we’re sorry to interrupt your regular internet programming to bring you an exciting late breaking guest announcement today. Happy to officially drop the news that Biella Coleman, NYU Prof of Media Culture and Communication (read: awesomeness), will be a featured guest at ROFLCon II!

Specifically, she’ll be taking the helm and moderating our final mega-blowout keynote panel “Mainstreaming the Web,” with moot, Know Your Meme, Ben Huh, and Greg Rutter. Which is excellent.

Biella has done a great deal of work on the eccentric interfaces of internet culture and mainstream culture, and has had the fine distinction of presenting slides on lulz in various srs settings. For those among you of the definitively geekier persuasion, her name will probably be familiar from her turbo-charged work on open source/free software communities.

Anyways, this is superb news. Welcome aboard!

photo courtesy sfllaw, CC BY SA

So — today, we were going to claim that we had successfully confirmed Goatse for ROFLCon II, and then link to it. But we figured that’d be in poor taste (and not in keeping with ROFLCon’s general high standards for “professional” behavior). Besides, anything we could come up with would probably pale in awesomeness to what some of our guests are up to today (and elsewhere).

To that end, we’re extremely happy today to confirm that the University of Illinois’ very own Lisa Nakamura will be attending and moderating at ROFLCon II! Lisa is a professor over at their Communication Research and Media Studies program, and head honcho of their Asian American studies program.

Her work is all over the questions about race (real and fictional) and internet culture, and it’s led to some seriously badass stuff (see, i.e. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft“). Worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet (pdf alert).

We could go on and on, but for now, just wanted to say that we’re thrilled to have her! We’ll have more details and schedule info out tomorrow (yes, it’s true: we’ve finally hammered it all out).

In the proud tradition of Jason Scott’s unbelievably kickass “Before the LOL” talk back in April, we’ve been looking for something geek/internet culture historical to round out the final slot of the rapidly upcoming San Francisco ROFLThing, and today I’m happy to announce that we’ve confirmed Stanford Prof Fred Turner to speak on August 29th!

Fred wrote a history of the early-early hippie San Francisco tech scene “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” and his talk, “Buckminster Fuller and the Technocratic Counterculture,” will be about Fuller’s dreams of comprehensive design and how they influence the trajectory of internet/technology culture today. The ROFLCon team saw him speak back last year — and it was pretty epic. Should be rockin’

You can listen to a talk that he did at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society a little while back here.

Fresh off her role as a moderator on this year’s SXSW panel “I’m Internet Famous,” I’m happy to announce today that NYU Grad Student Alice Marwick will be giving our Saturday morning keynote! Alice’s research delves into the intricate ties of tech and culture, identity and online social behavior. A hot delicious taste of what you’ll be getting is available here.

Bad. Ass.

Word on the street today that David Weinberger, Berkman Fellow, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and the awesome Everything Is Miscellaneous, will be giving the opening keynote on internet fame at ROFLCon and moderating our first panel “You Can Get Paid for This?” Needless to say, we’re pretty excited to have him on board with the conference.

I’d be lying if I said that Weinberger doesn’t kick major ass at plumbing the depths of the internet and its implications (references: Authors@Google, Internet and Society 2007). For information on him, you can check out an extended description here, though I figure I’ll sum up this post with David’s “No Brain” description of himself:

Him write good.
Him help companies do stuff.
Him smell ok.

Thanks to a tip from the amazing Christopher Kelty at Rice, we’ve been able to get in touch with Rich Doyle, Professor of English at Penn State University. Rich works in the field of cultural studies of science and researches the rhetoric of emerging technologies, including information technology. You can read more about his work here. He is currently working on a trilogy of works about the development and nature of transhuman (that is, ambiguously biological or mechanical) knowledges. You can read a few pages of his Wetwares here, it’s pretty amazing stuff.

Pending some arrangements, Rich will be attending ROFLCon to discuss his research and potentially moderating/speaking on one of our panels!

As I mentioned a few days ago, we’re in the process of revising the provisional schedule that we’ve been working with, so stay tuned. We’re looking to join up a firm academic base with the formidable industry and celebrity guests that we’ve already compiled. Suggestions for people who would be good for this very very welcome.

In the throes of my hardcore procrastination (Harvard has its finals period after break), I was examining everything ROFL and found that a member of our Facebook group had posted a link to his research paper about lulz.

Research paper. Explaining. Lulz. 

This is really exciting to me because I must admit that 4chan’s mentality and culture were always a bit inexplicable to me. My old haunt on the internets was somewhat downstream of Something Awful and 4chan, so while I became familiar with the meme culture as it floated on by, I didn’t quite understand how it was generated and who the “cool kids” were that got to determine what was funny and what wasn’t.

And now, an insider’s detailed explanation! This paper is neither comprehensive nor academically rigorous, but it definitely does go a long way for those of us who understand the world that 4chan influences but not what exactly went on inside the black box. It’s like lurking moar but in a conveniently bite-sized package. I suggest you read it!

Along those lines, amazingly enough, we recently got word that Harvard’s own English/Visual and Environmental Studies rock star, J.D. Connor, will be speaking at our humble conference. He teaches courses on Hollywood and the 1960s in both departments, and is also a pretty ridiculous fountain of knowledge about internet culture. Prior to joining the professorial ranks at Harvard, he was the ‘Fraymaster’ on one of my favorite means of procrastination, Slate. The Fray is quite a reader discussion forum; you can see how it’s different from normal flame-y web forums here. We are really, really stoked about his involvement with the conference, both in terms of his incredible behind-the-scenes advice and, now, his being on a panel, moderating discussions, and/or making sure the conference doesn’t devolve into a silly famefest. Badass in so many ways.

the man himself — don’t mess.

Amidst all the partying like a rockstar at ROFLCon’s subterranean/cyber HQ(s), it’s sometimes too easy to forget that we are putting together a conference, not just a convention. The goal of ROFLCon isn’t just to exhibit internet memes, nor is it just to give meme originators the chance to speak and interpret the larger lessons (if there are any) of their fame. From the beginning, for me, ROFLCon has been a talk-back between “memers” and academics. Studying “memes” and the internet is important for two distinct reasons. One, the internet has unquestionably changed the way our generation relates and communicates with one another. It has reshaped human interactions and also, as we saw with w00ts entry into Merriam Webster, shaped language. Second, the internet has served to enlarge anthropological phenomenons that have always been present in human interactions. As such, it is a treasure trove for a new breed of cyber anthropologists who can document the way facebook and myspace and (yes!) World of Warcraft reshape communities. In short, at ROFLCon, Jane Goodall gets to talk and so do the apes (jk!!!).

Judith Donath, director of the MIT sociable media group, represents an amazing emerging field of cyber scholars, and I am excited to announce that she will be speaking at ROFLCon, tentatively in the LOLCats panel. MIT sociable media group is super cool in it’s own right, and personally I’d love to see them present some of their projects at ROFLCon. They’ve done a lot of work with the application of signaling theory (roughly how we try to convey information about ourselves) and how it relates to online interaction. Plus, if you search “lolcats” on google scholar, Judith is the only hit. Sexy.

I recall some examples of trying to explain particular internet memes to friends of mine. I once tried to describe to a friend why a lolcat was funny and culturally important, but I couldn’t come up with any description that could do it justice (sidenote: it is even more difficult to describe a lolcat to your parents. Don’t even try.). Basically I told him, “It’s a picture of a cat doing something weird, and he has bad grammar and spells words wrong, too.” But that doesn’t seem funny at all. It seems utterly pointless, which most memes arguably are. But then why the vast importance in our culture, and why does everybody know about them?

I ask these “why” questions not rhetorically to try to set up some theory of my own, but to try to get some user or visitor opinions to figure out the answer. Certainly the idea of a widely shared consciousness and cultural propagation comes into play, as Richard Dawkins described thirty years ago, but why are the most widely known internet memes the ones that are the most completely ridiculous?

As we mentioned before, beyond being just a convention riffing on the awesome spectacles that make up internet culture, ROFLCon’s very consciously aiming to be a conference to get some serious hardcore discussion going on the plenty of intriguing issues at the touching points of internet, memetics, anthropology, comparative media, and all that.

To that end, we’re opening up a new front in the ongoing guest list war and expanding our hunting to include folks in the academic community.

That why, in the first of what will be many awesome faculty guests at ROFLCon, I’m pretty enthused to announce that Chris Kelty, professor with the Anthropology department of Rice University, will be attending ROFLCon!

Chris has done a great deal of work in the field of internet culture and history, and is currently working on Two Bits, a study of free software and its implications.

Check out his personal website (with CV) here.